One night – many experiences: public readings of contemporary literature performed by well known personalities at attractive and unusual venues in cities across Europe.

 

European Literature Night builds on the concept of literature being a unique creative medium which embraces the voices of individuals along with the values of the society they live in. The umbrella project “European Literature Nights 2012 – 2014” aims to bring contemporary European literature to the general public in an innovative way through a series of public readings and accompanying events. Supported by a grant from the Culture Programme of the European Union, the project partners hope to deliver high level of impact to their audiences. Although it is Brno, Bucharest, Dublin, Lisbon, Vilnius, Prague and Wroclaw who are jointly co-organizing the project “ELN 2012 – 2014”, the other partner cities where Literature Night already took root are of no lesser importance for the event’s development.

partner cities
Brno
Bucharest
Dublin
Lisbon

Rosa Liksom

Already during decades the Lapland-born Finnish cosmopolitan Rosa Liksom has contributed to cultural life at home and abroad with her paintings, written works, plays and video art. Her books have already been translated into almost twenty languages, including one Portuguese translation (Os Paraísos do Caminho Vazio e Outros Contos, 1994). In 2011, Hytti nro 6 (Compartment Number 6) by Rosa Liksom was awarded the Finlandia prize, i.e. the most prestigious literary prize in Finland. This year (2013) the same novel has been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize.

Rosa Liksom was born in 1958 in Ylitornio, in Finnish Lapland. She lived her childhood in an eight-house village community. At the age of seventeen she moved to Helsinki. She had miscellaneous jobs and studied anthropology and social sciences at universities in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Moscow. She spent her youth, as she herself says, “(occupying buildings and) living in squats and communes throughout Europe”. From 1982 to 1986 she lived within the alternative culture of the “free town” of Kristiania, in Copenhagen. She spent many summers in Paris. She also lived in Northern Norway and Iceland and spent the Brezhnev era in Moscow. In 1987 she moved back to Helsinki, where she still continues to live and work.

writing

locations

readers

Prague
Vilnius
Wrocław